Anna and the Librarian

A fervent Unionist from Baltimore, Anna Ella Carroll was an active pamphleteer who knew many of the Republican Party’s leaders. As the months-old war intensified, Carroll embarked on a series of trips across the border states. At the time she claimed her trips were for family and social visits; later she claimed they were for the Union, declaring herself the spy who saved the country.

“While prosecuting my writing I was also diligently inquiring as to the best means of averting the dangers which threatened the Union,” Carroll wrote of her clandestine activities later, in an 1886 article in the North American Review. Many of her trips took her to St. Louis, which she believed was not only vital to the Union but also a great place to socialize with Confederate sympathizers and learn their secrets.

Carroll loitered near the Benton Barracks and met with riverboat captains. In her 1886 article, Carroll gives an extensive account of how she turned a white-bearded librarian into a key source:

At the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, … I met the brother of General Albert Sydney [sic] Johnston, who happened to be the librarian … He expressed astonishment that I, a Southern woman, should be working so vigorously against my section, and “after all it would amount to nothing; that, by spring, the whole thing would be at an end; Price would have redeemed Missouri, and Buckner the whole of Kentucky; and, before spring even, the party of peace would be at the front, and demand concessions from your Government or strike for independence.” “Independence, indeed!” said I, “before spring your boasted independence as a nation will be at an end.” “How said he,” are you going to reduce the Mississippi?” I looked him in the face, surrounded by his friends, and said, “yes; before spring all the strongholds of the Mississippi will have vanished as thin air.” They all sneered, and thought me, no doubt, a very foolish calculator. However, Mr. Johnston continued to lend me books, and treated me with due attention. As the brother of Gen. A. B. Johnston, I took note of all he said.

Maryland State ArchivesAnna Ella Carroll

That conversation and others, in turn, led her to see the importance of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers to any successful Union strategy. Carroll then sought an audience with Gen. John C. Frémont, the commanding officer in Missouri at the time; she also wrote to Attorney General Edward Bates, also from St. Louis. Finally, after even more attempts, her recommendation “was in the hands of President Lincoln, and fully understood as coming direct from me.” Carroll claimed than her messenger, Col. Thomas A. Scott, said “he never saw a greater manifestation of pleasure than Mr. Lincoln expressed as soon as he saw my solution of the great problem of the war.”

Carroll’s claims were always controversial. General Grant, President Lincoln and others who led the eventual Union campaigns down the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers argued this was an obvious strategy for splitting the Confederacy, and they had not needed Carroll’s “insights.” Nevertheless, Carroll continued to argue the contrary, and published an extensive account of her spying activities in order to seek both recognition and back pay.

There were several problems with her account. The librarian she discovered was no close relation to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston; if anything, he was closer to Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, but not in regular contact. As a later Mercantile librarian, Clarence Miller, suggested, “Perhaps she confused Albert Sidney with Algernon Sidney, Johnston’s real brother,” before concluding that “no one on a secret mission can afford to make mistakes in identity, but Anna loses herself in a labyrinth of confusion.”

Carroll spent her life in claims of heroism and writing self-serving accounts of her time during the war. She was never vindicated, though several women’s groups, as well as Republican Party bigwigs, continued to support her until her death from a kidney ailment in 1894. If she was a source of derision to some, she was held a hero by others. But Edward William Johnston, the Mercantile Library’s head librarian from whom she claimed to have learned so much, faced a much worse fate.

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Johnston was born in Virginia in 1799, and as the war began he was a bespectacled gentleman much esteemed in St. Louis; his 1859 catalogue for the St. Louis Mercantile Library collection was the first anywhere to use subject classifications, and it became a regular reference in the Library of Congress before they developed their own system. Yet Johnston was also unabashedly pro-Confederate, and as the war continued and loyalty oaths were required of all officeholders, public or private, in St. Louis, he refused. In January 1862, Johnston resigned.

Johnston’s travails continued even as he cooperated with Union authorities, his health deteriorating. His cramped handwriting gave evidence of an increasing palsy, and he suffered a relapse of erysipelas, an agony of rash and fevers. The provost marshal’s office still demanded a medical certification and a personal appearance from Johnston. In dire financial straits, Johnston begged the federal authorities to decide whether to banish him, and to act quickly if so. By the summer of 1863, after his wife had been arrested, Johnston complained, “I am shut out from all employment … made an alien if not an outlaw.” Johnston was eventually sent through Kentucky to his home state of Virginia.

Johnson’s pro-Confederate leanings didn’t help his case, but he suffered greatly from Carroll’s claims. Whether true or not, her conversations with Edward Johnston made him more of a target for the Union provost marshal. Old, sick, and no more militant than a librarian, he was not immune from scrutiny. While Carroll championed her plan for the Union, Johnston embarked on what he called his “enforced journey” in ill health. The treatment of this aged librarian revealed how, as the war progressed, the suspicion of Confederate sympathizers increased, and uncertainty led to extreme solutions.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.